Call centers are used in particular for processing telephone requests, for example in administration centers, in insurance companies, in mail-oriented companies, and for home or direct banking. For this purpose, the call center has a group of employees, who are also referred to as agents and respond to the requests by telephone. For efficient processing of the telephone requests and answers, the agents are provided with appropriate technical equipment, such as PCs, via which they can access databanks with information, for example, about the caller.
One major aspect in a call center is the signaling of a telephone request or of an incoming call, as well as the subscriber access number or subscriber number of the caller. A further important aspect is the control of the signaled call, that is to say by way of example call acceptance and the setting up of a call connection, or else the passing on of calls to other agents with special knowledge if it is evident from the profile that that caller requires specialized advice.
Until now, incoming calls in call centers have been distributed by an automatic call distribution system (ACD) to the agents' telephones or PCs for processing. The distribution has been carried out either via the call center's own telephone network or via the public telephone network, when the agents are located at different points.
Calls and subscriber numbers may be signaled, by way of example, via the ISDN D channel. If the agent has a PC with CIT (Computer Integration Telephony), then the incoming call and the subscriber number may also be signaled, by way of example, directly on the PC monitor. The agent can then use the subscriber number to check a caller profile from a databank, via his PC. The setting up of a call connection or the passing on of the call to a specialist agent is carried out by the agent himself, by means of the signaling techniques of the public digital ISDN telephone network.
However, ISDN is used to widely differing extents in different countries: while ISDN is now widely used in Europe and, in particular, in Germany, ISDN is less widely used, by way of example, in the USA. In contrast, the Internet Protocol is becoming ever more widely used and may now even be used for the transmission of (telephone) call signals, for example using the voice over IP format.